II.

THE CAPITAL CITY;

OR

SOCIETY IN TOWN.

THE City of Albany may justly challenge comparison with the inland towns of America, for beauty of situation and peculiar historical interest. Midway in the lovely valley of the "Great River of the Mountains," it scales its triple-headed hill, crowned by the Capitol, from whose dome is seen a landscape of wondrous beauty. The shadowy Catskills contend with drifting mountains of clouds along her southern horizon, subsiding into the exquisite azure hues of the Helderberg. Down the valley, the Hudson slowly winds its placid way around projecting headlands to the distant sea; and smiling with cultivated slopes and wooded knolls, its western shores ascend to the hills whence the mountains of New England are seen

to welcome the rising sun. All along these curv ing banks, up these woody ascents, and down this long, green vale is poured that indescribable atmosphere of magic quiet which lulls the whole region, from the Adirondack to the ocean, to a calm sleep, startled now and then into the hurried dream of a busy town. A hundred thousand people are working out the problem of life beneath the gazer's eye; their fret and toil and triumph enfolded in this drowsy enchantment of nature.

Seen from the western hills, the city crowns her blended heights with a surpassing grace; while, in her own streets the citizen is arrested in his hurried walk by a vision of glittering waves and wooded summits and fertile fields, at the end of a vista of bricks and pavements. With no pretensions to architectural grandeur, but with much of the reality of comfortable housing, healthful air, and solid prosperity, the dweller in our ancient town should long hesitate before, he leaves her country-girdled streets for the prison of noisy ways and crushing toil, the great cities of our land have become.

And if, while standing in this post of observation, the history of our venerable Capital City could pass in panorama before our eyes, what remarkable changes would excite our admiration.

Through the dim mist of 250 years, we behold the "Half Moon," Hendrick Hudson, master, crawling along the shores, gazed at by savages surprised into the mood of gentle children. Six years pass, and above the low flats of yonder island rises a Dutch trading-house-26 by 36, stockaded fifty feet square, with its moat of eighteen feet, bristling with a few iron and stone guns, garrisoned by the ten men who have now become the 100,000 that people this area of ten miles. Anon the trading-house becomes a fort, first nestling where steamboats now do congregate, then bravely climbing the hill and laying its corner-stone as high as the roof of the present St. Peter's church. Another seven years finds the father of many Patroons the owner of his princely estate, stretching from the great Cohoes Falls, twenty-four miles on either side of the river; and lovelier manor never cheered the heart of feudal lord. In twelve years more the first minister of Christianity arrives and the germ of the most ancient church is planted. The little village of Beaverwyck, clustering beneath its fort, becomes the scene of fierce conflict, and violent hands from Manhattan tear down the flag of feudal proprietorship, and lay the foundations of the Corporation of Albany in the first court here instituted. Not long after the English power becomes supreme, in 1664,

and in 1668 our town becomes the first chartered city in the United States of America; yet thirty years more will scarcely suffice to bring her a thousand citizens.

Now look ahead three-fourths of a century, and you behold our slow Capital City, in 1745, laced up in a stockade, lying on the hill-side like a pear, whose stem is the fort opposite St. Peter's, and whose base is washed by the river. Garrulous old Peter Kalm strays up here, gets hooted in the streets by the boys for his French fashions, goes off "in a huff," and tells sad stories about the little Dutch town on the borders of the interminable wilderness. Its quiet is often disturbed by the bustle of public affairs; a shudder runs through its drowsy streets as the news of French and Indian invasions come through the woods; here encamp and equip the armies that are to hurl back the successive waves that rolled from the St. Lawrence, only to spend themselves in the woods above; here congregate the colonial governors to deliberate on American taxation; and not a quarter of a century later the old town laughed outright as the famous procession, inaugurating the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, swept from the fields about Watervliet, to the big tent on the hill.

We look again at the beginning of the present